Memes and Whatnot

I was bothered by a factual inconsistency of the piece Our Barbies, Ourselves  and decided to research a bit about it. FThere is such a gross error in what Prager says about who designed Barbie. According to her, "Barbie was designed by a man." That's just factually incorrect. Barbie was based on the design of a German doll known as Bild Lilli. Picture for reference: Here you can see the resemblance, in terms of proportions to Barbie. Want to take a guess who introduced the idea of replicating this doll? It was actually a female - Ruth Handler, who at the time was an executive at Mattel. A bit of backstory, before she laid eyes on this doll, she was trying to develop a doll that had "an adult body" (Ruth Handler's Wiki Page). Her husband actually suggested that the doll was too "voluptuous." Her family had vacationed to Europe where she brought home the Bild Lilli doll, which was in fact "not a children's toy, but rather an adult gag ...

I found it to be extremely fitting that the essay that we had to analyze last Monday was about scientists and the research that they conduct, considering we have a real life example to compare it to: the Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). For a bit of background information, the 2019-nCoV originated from Wuhan, China, and as the name suggests, from 2019 - December of 2019 to be more precise. nCoV type viruses have actually been around for a long time infecting animals. The two most well known cases of other nCoV viruses are MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which originated from camels and cats respectively. This strain of the Coronavirus is thought to have originated from snakes, and this virus is most closely related the SARS. The jobs of scientists during this time is extremely critical as the 2019-nCoV virus is relatively contagious. "Some viruses are highly contagious (like measles), while other viruses are less so. At this time, it’...

Quite frankly, I hate this essay. I think some of the points that Tannen brings up are completely invalid and offer no real purpose in her essay. It's fair to say that one can characterize Tannen as being a feminist, and by definition a feminist is someone who advocates women's rights on the basis of equality of the sexes What we see however, are points made by her that support the stance that women are inherently better than men. The biggest perpetrator of this is her biological argument. In my opinion, a biological argument has no place in a social commentary. She pulls from Fasold who says language and culture are particularly unfair in treating women as the marked case because biologically is the male that is marked I agree with the fact that it is unfair that women are deemed to be the marked members of society, however the basis on which Fasold pulls this conclusion is completely baseless. Why should it matter that it is men who are marked biologically? This essay ...

I have to say the title was a bit off putting, you wouldn't really expect a student in 11 AP English to write an all lowercase title mixed with numbers would you? Basically, one has the stereotype that students in 11 AP write with proper grammar. Stereotypes are going to be the topic of this blog post. But before we jump into that, let's look at my (less than stellar) notes. I have to say though, it does do a good job of summarizing the key points of Chapter 8 of The Leavers. Basically, it does an overview of the character traits that are either reinforced, introduced, or contrasted. This chapter struck me a bit differently because so much of the chapter was dedicated to him talking about college. As someone who values higher education, I don't really understand how he could be so careless to hand his father a fake college essay. I mean come on, why did he even write an essay like that? I think the more important bit to explore is the fact that Daniel, someone w...

Eminent Domain is quite honestly the pink elephant in the room. From the sources that we had to use for the synthesis essay, I would've assumed that this would be an issue that was known to everyone , but as it turns out, most people don't. Today , I want to talk about the clause that makes eminent domain fair - "with payment of compensation". Jesus  freaking Christ, this is such a vague clause. The government is literally like, we can take your land, and we decide what just compensation for it is. Once upon a time , for over 100 years existed in the U.S. Constitution. It wasn't until 1876 that it was used. That case in which it was used was a huge landmark supreme court case. The provisions of this basically deemed that The court ruled that it is necessary for the government to be able to seize property for its uses, such as creating infrastructure, which ultimately are determined by the legislature and not the judiciary. This essentially gives the government u...

Since I am a junior, I, like most other people reading this blog, will have to take the SAT or the ACT. I personally took my SAT yesterday, and I thought that it went pretty well. Yay me! But that got me thinking, what enabled me to perform to a standard that I was happy with? By far it would be the time and money that I put into studying for the SAT. Studying for the SAT came with many costs including purchasing books with practice tests. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with having to purchase textbooks to improve my SAT taking abilities. But what I think is wrong is that the SAT tests material that is not representative of what schools teach. Take for example the Writing section of the SAT, when was the last time in your English class that you studied just grammar rules? I can quite confidently say that never happened. Then take the reading section, if I was to take an average high school in the United States, I can also quite confidently state the level of reading that is req...

Here's me, chilling on my bed scrolling through TikTok like the lifeless person I am, and I stumble upon this:  https://vm.tiktok.com/H3wkPv/ . I highly recommend y'all watch this, if you don't this entire blog post will have no context. Claiming that I'm Hispanic, I mean this in no offense to Hispanic people, will help me get into college. After some researching, aka reading a Vox article on this, I stumbled upon this image:  To most people, the above infographic shouldn't come as a surprise. We all have the notion that race does in fact play a role in college admission, and this study by Princeton researchers proves it. Don't get me wrong, I think affirmative action is definitely a step in the right direction in the efforts of reducing de facto racism in America, however, I truly believe that there are better ways to be going about this. To address the issue of why do something other than affirmative action, the answer is quite simple: it doesn't work...